still looking for decent PDF annotation tool

[Tony Pursell]

On Fri, 2011-01-21 at 11:42 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Jan 2011, Arnaud G wrote:
> 
> > I know it's not free but I do a lot of pdf work and find it
> > excellent. PDF studio from qoppa
> > http://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/index.html
> 
>   ok, i'll check into that but at the risk of annoying by way of
> repetition, let me describe clearly what i'm after and others can let
> me know if they have actually *used* something that constitutes a
> solution (you'll see what i mean by that shortly).
> 
>   i proofread a number of sizable word documents from a certain
> publisher and the pattern until now has been to open these docs in
> openoffice (3.2 in my case), go into Edit > Changes, then select both
> "Record" and "Show", for obvious reasons.
> 
>   i then start proofreading and all of my feedback falls into two
> categories:
> 
>   * short, in-place edits, where the fact that a line has been changed
> is visually obvious by a mark (vertical bar) in the margin, and
> 
>   * longer comments added on the right side, using Ctl+Alt+N (insert >
> comment), for which i use the word "annotate"
> 
> and that's it -- i have no need of any other changes to the document
> i'm reviewing.  and when i'm done, i save it back to the original doc
> format, and email it back.
> 
>   occasionally, i'm handed a PDF file and i would like to be able to
> do the same thing -- precisely those two operations, or as close as i
> can get to them so, occasionally, i end up googling on some
> combination of "ubuntu pdf file edit annotate".  and while there are
> always a number of alleged solutions, not all of them work.
> 
>   example 1: many places happily suggest that you can edit PDF files
> from within oodraw as long as you add oracle's "PDFimport" plugin.
> good luck with that.  i've installed the plugin in oodraw, then tried
> to open a simple PDF file, only to get:
> 
>   General Error.
>   General input/output error.
> 
> what numerous web pages claim should just work does *not*, in fact,
> just plain work.  so much for oodraw.
> 
>   as for okular, that looks promising but let's read here:
> 
> http://okular.kde.org/faq.php
> 
> "How can I annotate a document and send it to a friend/colleague/etc?
> 
> "Since KDE 4.2, Okular has the "document archiving" feature. This is
> an Okular-specific format for carrying the document plus various
> metadata related to it (currently only annotations). You can save a
> "document archive" from the open document by choosing "File -> Export
> As -> Document Archive". To open an Okular document archive, just open
> it with Okular as it would be eg a PDF document"
> 
>   so that sounds like, if i annotate a PDF file with okular, i have to
> save it in an okular-specific format, so that the recipient must
> *also* install okular.  not a big deal, i can just tell the recipient
> to do that, but it just adds that extra requirement.  am i
> understanding that correctly?
> 
> rday
> 

I think the whole problem of PDF files is that they are designed to be
immutable objects - so any form of annotation that changes the PDF
itself should be impossible.  For someone to send you a PDF for
annotation is completely wrong and misses the point of having PDFs in
the first place, so they should not object to having your annotations
and edits sent back to them in some other format.  

So any method of annotation is going to be a bit of a botch.  Here is
mine:

Open the PDF in GIMP.  Use the text tool (and other tools, maybe) to
make annotations. Print back to a PDF (I seem to get this option as one
of my 'printers' so I may have installed something to do it). 

Tony